This is Brad Walker’s final blog piece reflecting on his career path that has spanned several countries, multiple non-profits, and a range of issues that have brought him to where he is today. We are grateful of the work he has done on behalf of MCE and wish him the best of luck!

For anyone who finds themselves drawn serendipitously or intentionally to environmental work, it is no secret that it can be discouraging.

In our political climate, which has grown increasingly hostile and corporatized, environmental activism often is reactive. We are immobilized to make change and proactively protect our planet because special interests have captured the very mechanisms of our democracy.

As the saying goes, we occasionally win the environmental battles but we are losing the war.

We cannot address environmental problems unless we have the foresight to address larger (and arguably more insidious) root causes – the relentless pursuit of profit over community health, the myth of unlimited growth, the corporatization of our public resources like clean water and air, and the buying and selling of our democracy.

The past few years have been difficult – we have seen unprecedented rollbacks in environmental protections, the widening of the wealth gap, and the spending of untold sums on political campaigns. But when I look to the future of our movement, Isee hope if all environmentalists would also become fervent defenders of democracy.

My second career path

I have had a very interesting and satisfying second career working on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) and more recently the the Missouri River, which has spanned over 11 years and three organizations. In retrospect it may have been pre-destined to happen.… Read the rest

Over the last 40 years the average citizen’s income, security, education, health and prospects for their children’s future has eroded. It has become increasingly difficult to protect the environment and the rights of the majority of real people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in this country. During the same time, corporations have become more monopolistic, powerful, large, and politically influential. Is there a correlation to these diverging paths?

Figure 1: Convention Agenda and Attendance Pins

Between August 3 and 6, 2017 MCE staff members Caitlin Zera and Brad Walker attended a Democracy Convention in Minneapolis, MN along with hundreds of other people from across the country. This was the third such convention since 2011. Thirteen organizations convened the convention that was broken into eight topic conferences covering a wide range of topics: including Community and Worker Power, Democratizing the Constitution, Earth Rights & Global Democracy, Democratizing our Schools, Colleges & Universities, Media Democracy, Peace & Democracy, Racial Justice, and Voting Rights & Open Government. The underlying theme was how to address the increasing negative impact of overwhelming corporate influence on all layers of government. Over 140 presentations with 150 speakers were offered, typically on 75 minute tracks with ten concurrent presentations.

The one significant difficulty with the convention was that too many interesting topics were offered concurrently; meaning we had to chose to attend one presentation from up to ten topics we may have wanted to learn about. Presentations were not recorded so there is no opportunity to watch the ones that were missed.… Read the rest

I was fortunate to be invited to speak at a July 8, 2017 event at Central Print in St. Louis. It was organized to introduce a new river advocacy and resource book by Cole Williams, an author from St. Paul, MN. The book is titled Hear the River Dammed: Poems From the Edge of the Mississippi. Local author Dean Klinkenberg also read from his Frank Dodge mystery series. Below is the text of my short talk.

By Brad Walker, Rivers Director July 12, 2017

The Upper Mississippi River is an icon, but its image is misleading and distorted.

We like to think of the river as a tamed immortal giant constantly rolling past us, its history providing us with nostalgic stories.

The reality is something quite different.

The river is actually highly altered and degraded primarily due to two major activities:

Damming and channeling the river for barges.

Disconnecting the floodplains from the river for industrial agriculture.

The result today is a river that is not recreation-friendly, is increasingly devoid of native species, and is more flood-prone.… Read the rest

The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card was recently released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and a cursory review leaves me to wonder, who is editing this thing? Is anyone looking critically at making sure investment recommendations are worthwhile and in the public interest? Much of our nation’s infrastructure was built during the 1930s New Deal as part of a grand vision to build dams, roads and bridges. While those federal investments are credited at least with bringing the nation out of the Depression, some of those investments have caused unacceptable environmental damages, like the dams that block migrating salmon. Infrastructure today needs a new vision that focuses on building a more sustainable future, like high speed rail, functional mass transit and renewable energy. Unfortunately, the ASCE is stuck in the 20th century as it evaluates the nation’s infrastructure.

“ASCE and its members are dedicated to ensuring a sustainable future in which human society has the capacity and opportunity to maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely, without degrading the quantity, quality or the availability of natural, economic and social resources.”

Obviously, the statement is a legitimate and encompasses many of the basic components of sustainability. However, as many growth-oriented organizations ignore, there is no consideration of what specific physical and biologic needs and how much of them are essential to “maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely.”

The ASCE uses its Report Card to quantify how much it would cost to repair existing system or expand them, but there is no questioning of whether all of the existing infrastructure systems are actually providing public value or even have the potential of being sustainable. The overarching philosophy is to maintain these systems without looking beyond them to fundamental changes in how the systems work or don’t work in providing their intended benefit, which is not corporate profits.

This is especially true of the Inland Waterways System (IWS), which is the most subsidized commodity transport system in the U.S. and a system that has highly damaged one of the most diverse, productive and rare habitats that exists – rivers and floodplains.

There is a fundamental problem with this ASCE Report Card regarding the IWS, which is strongly based on the U.S.… Read the rest

After a century of recklessly damaging our rivers — far too often for little public benefit, one would hope that we would have learned some lessons. One of them should be that we would make it easier to restore our rivers than it is to further damage them. The committee structures intended to provide specific recommendations on river management that our lawmakers enacted, unfortunately, have produced the opposite result.

In 1986 Congress gave the barge industry special interests a committee that, by its design, can easily agree on industry-favorable recommendations for further development of barge navigation. In contrast, river restoration advocates were saddled with a conflict-ridden, oversized committee that by its design is unlikely to agree on river restoration recommendations of any significance.

Congress has the ability to create committees and boards that are tasked with providing stakeholder recommendations and guidance to government agencies to help the agencies perform their duties. This article will compare two of those entities that were created to provide recommendations and guidance to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) regarding the Corps management of our rivers.

Introduction

The Inland Waterways System (IWS) is an industrialized version of what were once America’s natural major rivers. Congress authorized and funded massive alterations of the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Columbia, and other major rivers to accommodate nine-foot draft barges to be pushed up and down our rivers, typically by channelizing and/or damming the rivers. There are about 12,000 official miles within the IWS, all of the natural portions severely degraded by the alterations. The map in Figure 1 below shows the rivers and coastal areas that are a part of the IWS in blue lines and the ports on the rivers in yellow dots.

Figure 1: Coastal and Inland Waterway System

Since the vast majority of commodities transported on the IWS are shipped on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR), Illinois River, Ohio River and/or Lower Mississippi River, I will limit all detailed discussions on those four rivers. Table 1 below compares barge traffic volumes, appropriations and estimated Inland Waterways Trust Fund receipts for 2014 on those segments of the IWS. This table allows us to dig deeper into the cost and use of each of these segments of the IWS so that we can better evaluate the use of taxpayer dollars and weigh the benefits to society of the IWS, the industries it serves, and the materials it transports.… Read the rest

Our Upper Mississippi River landscape is replete with threatened and endangered species. This article is going to introduce you to one vulnerable species that you probably are unaware of — but none the less needs your help.

In August 2016 the 30th anniversary of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) program, formerly the Environmental Management Program was celebrated. The UMRR is a concession by Congress dating back to the 1986 Water Resources Development Act, primarily resulting from the battle over the construction of the Melvin Price Locks & Dam at Alton, Illinois. This history was chronicled in a Missouri Coalition for the Environment article titled The Dam That Was Too Big to Hide and is a true advocacy success story. Since 1986 much has been learned by the experts who have worked on the UMRR program, and there have been over 50 projects completed, and according to the Corps, the program has positively affected more than 100,000 acres of land in and adjacent to the UMR. But the river’s overall health has not really improved because the UMRR program is too small in scope and funding, and the major stressors — barge navigation and industrial agriculture — remain unabated.

However, this article is not about the UMRR program; it is about my concern for an endangered species that will never be listed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. It is the advocates that have worked against all odds to reform the Corps’ management of the river by focusing upon the first stressor listed above — barge navigation. Over the last more than eight decades the construction and maintenance of barge navigation infrastructure, as well as the direct actions of using nine-foot deep draft barges, have had significant negative effects upon the river environment and the costs of the system are nearly completely funded by the taxpayers. I am one of a relatively small group of people working to reform river navigation, almost all of who are members of the Nicollet Island Coalition (NIC).… Read the rest

Admit it, if you’ve ever seen it you’ve thought about being on The Daily Show. So have I. So on December 1, 2015, when I received an email from a person claiming to be from the show saying they wanted to do a field piece about questionable projects undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers, alarms immediately went off in my cynical brain and I wondered who was scamming me. After a bit of investigation, we were leaning towards this inquiry being legitimate.

In late December 2015 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an op-ed by the Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE) and Sierra Club regarding the America’s Watershed Initiative’s (AWI) Mississippi River Basin Report Card and a response from the CEO/President of the Waterways Council Inc. (WCI) compels this reply. Our op-ed responded to several Post-Dispatch articles about the Report Card’s release with two specific criticisms: the Report Card shows a bias towards barge navigation with the AWI’s organizational structure and there was a double-standard used in grading the ecosystem versus transportation. On January 11, 2016, the Post-Dispatch printed a response to our op-ed from the CEO/President of the Waterways Council Inc. (WCI), addressing only our first criticism and perpetuating myths about the public benefits of barges on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.

Before we discuss the details of the WCI response we have two important points to make.

A problem we have today is that because all of our major rivers have been so severely altered for navigation – navigation dams built on low water segments to create slack water pools and channelization on open segments to create canals for easier maintenance – most people have no real concept of what a healthy functioning river looks like. This is why we referred to the IWS in our editorial as “nostalgically-called rivers,” not because as WCI suggested we do not value rivers as a national treasure, but because the difference between an industrialized navigation channel is so drastically different from an ecologically functioning river, and because unfortunately most people simply do not know what we have lost.

If WCI truly wants to improve the health of the river, they would support the decoupling of the ecosystem restoration work from NESP and then lobby for its full funding so those scientists, engineers and contractors can start building restoration projects. Expanding the current barge system, however, cannot improve the river’s health since the Inland Waterways System (IWS) is the reason it is degraded in the first place.… Read the rest

By: Brad Walker – Missouri Coalition for the Environment, Caroline Pufalt – Missouri Chapter of the Sierra Club and Christine Favilla – Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club

November 23, 2015

Flooding at St. Louis – January 1, 2016

The American Watershed Initiative’s (AWI) recent overall D+ grade for the Mississippi River may be accurate, but the report is deficient in key points important to the public’s understanding of the river and their tax dollars.

Providing a report card for the basin is admittedly a gargantuan task and requires a lot of data and evaluation to accomplish. But the report is clearly biased toward “perfecting” a highly subsidized navigation system without examining the costs in tax dollars and detrimental river impacts of that infrastructure.

The report also lacks discussion of cause and effect among the elements it measures. When AWI (primarily a Nature Conservancy project) released this report card for the entire 31-state Mississippi River Basin, they graded six broad goals – Ecosystems (C), Flood Control & Risk Reduction (D+), Transportation (D+), Water Supply (C), Economy (C), and Recreation (C). Unfortunately, the promotion of the subsidized barge industry above all other interests prevents much-needed review of the effect river navigation infrastructure has on water quality, flood risk reduction, environmental health, and recreation.

Recent Post-Dispatch articles about the report card implied the D+ grade is primarily a matter of inadequate funding, especially related to the Transportation grade, which is exclusively about barge transport. Some quotes supporting this view are included below:

Among the worst-performing areas was navigation infrastructure such as locks and dams, said co-author Heath Kelsey, the director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

In an interview, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said that locks and dams were “in terrible condition” and that state and local governments could afford only so much.

Yet those quoted in the articles largely promote investing more money in the very infrastructure partially responsible for the low grades in other areas, especially the ecosystem. The culprit is the river barge system of locks and dams and the levees that primarily protect agriculture land that produces commodities that are shipped on the river.

The fact is that the construction of the Inland Waterway System (IWS) within the Upper Mississippi River, Illinois River, and Missouri River has been the prime cause of the degradation to these nostalgically called “rivers.” The barge infrastructure has had immense negative impacts upon biodiversity, the public services that a healthy river provides, and the taxpayers’ wallets.… Read the rest

Introduction

How do we value a river system? What should we count? What should we prioritize? If we decide to place dollars on everything, will that further commodify a river? If we don’t place dollars on everything, will it lead to bad decisions? All of these, and many others, are interesting questions that need consideration.

At the request of river interests, economic studies separately profiling the Lower and Upper Mississippi River basins have been completed by Industrial Economics, Incorporated over the last several years. The motivation for preparing these profiles is to attempt to document the volume of economic activity generated near the river in order to justify additional governmental spending on infrastructure, theoretically then increasing economic growth in these regions.

There are unstated underlying assumptions implied within these profiles that include:

The economic numbers are accurate

Greater economic growth is always better

Economic growth will provide increased human wellbeing

Increased economic growth will not have damaging impacts

By showing these economic numbers to decision makers we can properly increase investment in and near the river

Although the numbers are likely accurate, because these studies were based upon the erroneous philosophy of infinite resources, as reflected in our national development policies, the above assumptions are largely false. The studies admit that they do not quantify all of the values associated with the river. In fact, they do not document the primary value of a river system, its ecosystem services. By doing this they relegate the river value largely, though not completely, to the exploitation of its natural resources for economic gain, while ignoring the environmental and associated economic losses caused by these exploitative activities. This problem is discussed in a recent article titled Time to Stop Worshiping Economic Growth and more recently in an interview on National Public Radio – Questioning our Growth Fetish.

This is a distortion of our values because it not only allows, but encourages, us to destroy river environments for short-term and unequally distributed economic gain. By doing this we also impoverish future generations.… Read the rest